Most homes and businesses, both within the United States and around the world, use electrical power to operate a wide variety of appliances. For example, in a typical home or business, electrical appliances may consume electrical power to operate motors, provide lighting, operate entertainment electronics, operate computing electronics, provide heating and/or cooling for a building, for use in food preparation, cleanup, and/or food storage, to heat water, and for various power conversion processes required to operate an appliance.
Typically, users of electrical power are billed by utility companies or other power providers in accordance with the amount of power consumed by a customer, which necessarily depends upon the power consumed by the utility customer's various electrical appliances. Therefore, consumers may desire to better understand and manage the power consumed by electrical appliances for economic reasons. Moreover, concerns regarding the environmental impact of the power generation process has led many consumers of electrical power to prefer to reduce their use of electrical power in order to reduce the negative impacts of electrical power generation upon the environment for reasons beyond the immediate benefits of potentially reduced electrical costs.
Further, the electrical appliances that consume electrical power in a typical home or business are, to varying degrees, prone to failure, malfunction or degradation in operational efficiency. Depending upon the particular appliance involved, malfunctions may be rare or common, and may be mildly inconvenient or catastrophic. While a malfunctioning entertainment device may be annoying, a malfunctioning washing machine or dishwasher can indicate a water leak that can affirmatively damage a structure. A malfunctioning heating or air conditioning system can lead to uncomfortable or even life threatening conditions. Further, some malfunctions involving electrical appliances or the electrical system of a structure itself may create a risk of power loss or, worse yet, fire. Ideally, an electrical malfunction would be identified quickly or, better yet, identified as an impending problem before the malfunction occurs.
Appliance monitoring systems and methods may be useful to consumers, appliance manufacturers, utility companies, and/or various service providers, among others. For example, appliance monitoring systems may be used to understand the power consumption patterns of appliances in a home or business, the better to reduce needless power consumption and attain efficiencies, automate home functions, determine consumer behavior, as well as to identify possible faults, malfunctions or degradations in efficiency at the earliest possible occasion to avoid inconvenient or even catastrophic appliance failures.
A variety of approaches are known for use in monitoring the power consumption and/or behavior of electrical appliances, but these known systems and methods suffer from significant obstacles to widespread adoption.
The most reliable way to monitor devices such as electrical appliances is to have each one built with internal sensors, and means to communicate their status to a central automated management or user interface operating on a convenient platform. Said platforms can be associated with the device or remote from it. While the decreasing costs of electronics and communication devices makes it practical to include such things in high cost new devices (e.g. refrigerators, air conditioners), it is not practical for low-cost items (e.g. toasters, basic lighting fixtures) and is likely to remain so for many years. Moreover, there exists a large installed base of electrical appliances for which retrofitting sensors would be technologically impractical and unreasonably expensive even if technically feasible. For this reason, the wide spread adoption of monitors integral to electrical appliances to provide information regarding the performance of those appliances is not likely in either the near or medium term.
An approach to monitoring the performance of electrical appliances without integral monitoring sensors is the use of various types of sensors in close proximity to the electrical appliance. For example, a monitoring unit may be interposed between the appliance and the outlet, thereby permitting the monitoring unit to measure the current and/or voltage at the outlet in order to observe and record power consumed through it by the appliance. In some instances, such monitoring units may be augmented by devices that detect vibrations, sounds, or other events that provide information with regard to the operation of the appliance to be monitored. Unfortunately, such an approach often requires a one-to-one correspondence between monitors and electrical appliances, which may be both expensive and impractical for most applications, particularly within a home environment. Moreover, a sophisticated monitor of this type may be difficult for most homeowners to properly install or maintain.
Another approach to monitoring the consumption of electrical power that may be practical in some businesses that intensively consume electrical power, but that may be difficult to cost-justify for homes and other entities that consume relatively low amounts of electrical power, is the installation of monitoring systems as an integral part of the building's electrical system. For example, monitoring systems may be integrated into the breaker box through which a building's electrical power is delivered, thereby permitting a reasonably close monitoring of the power consumed on the various circuits within a building. However, such an approach is impractical for most existing structures with existing electrical systems. Moreover, even for new construction, the integration of specialized energy monitoring units within a building's electrical system may be too expensive and impractical to use in most instances.
For these reasons, it is desirable to provide systems and methods that may be readily adapted to monitoring the power consumption and/or behavior of electrical appliances receiving power from a previously installed electrical system.